The Current State of the Block Theme Market

Matt Cromwell
00:04-01:27
Hey everyone, welcome, welcome. If you are in the WordPress theme business, then you've probably felt the ground shifting underneath you recently. Full site editing, block based designs, changes in the marketplace are reshaping what it takes to succe Theme shops that don't adapt quickly right now risk really falling behind very quickly. To unpack what's happening there and where it's headed we wanted somebody who has been through it, been through the ringer of themes and block themes, who's pivoted and built and sold and kept on building. And so today's special guest is Brian Gardner. We'll see you on the other side. This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing. business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show. Welcome, welcome. I am Matt Cromwell from Stellar WP. And I am Zack Katz from GravityKit And like I said, we've got a special guest today. Brian Gardner is with us. Brian, hey man, welcome, welcome.

Brian Gardner
01:29-01:31
Hello, everybody. Glad to be here.

Matt Cromwell
01:32-01:40
For those who aren't in the know, tell them who you are, what you do, what makes you so famous. I'm just kidding.

Brian Gardner
01:42-02:17
Nothing. So, yes, I am Brian Gardner. I am head of community at WP Engine. I am a WordPress I don't obsessor. I don't even know anymore what to call myself. I think about it all the time. I've been doing WordPress things since 2006. Founded Studio Press, co-created the Genesis framework with Nathan Rice. And currently have a few side projects that I'm dabbling in. So I'll channel my Barb my inner Barbara Mandrell. And I was a WordPress themer when WordPress theming wasn't cool.

Matt Cromwell
02:17-02:24
Absolutely. Brian, you're like the reason why I even know what an action hook is at all in the first place.

Brian Gardner
02:28-02:44
I didn't know what one was either until Nathan and I started building Genesis. I mean, the relationship he and I had for like the five-second version is that I would speak in English to Nathan and he would then bring it back in code. I'd be like, well, how do we do this? And If that, then do that. And he would write the code, bring it back.

Zack Katz
02:44-02:52
I'd look at it and be like, oh, hey. Genesis was the same for me. It took me from being an HTML guy to being a PHP guy.

Matt Cromwell
02:52-03:19
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really broke ground in ways that nothing else was at the time at all. And I have to say, I was like, I think I know this WordPress thing. I think I got this down. And then somebody was like, you should try Genesis. And I looked at it and I was like, Why? Why? I don't understand. Everything is different and weird, and I'm uncomfortable because it made me feel like I didn't know anything again. It was a big, fun, interesting learning curve for me for sure.

Brian Gardner
03:21-03:54
Yeah, Genesis was the product of my design and visual ADHD because every other day I would have just a different design idea, and I kept I went to Nathan. I'm like, hey, how do we do this where I don't have to literally build a brand new theme every single time I have an idea? Because so much of what I'm doing is like the same core code. And that's sort of the impetus of how Genesis got started. I was like. I just need to like style design, like, and have that be kind of decoupled in a sense from all of the code, which was basically you know, repetitive. So that's that's how Genesis and child theme sort of came.

Matt Cromwell
03:54-04:43
I think what's fascinating to me too, like kind of like in the WordPress history kind of Things is that there are like a lot of folks who actually really cut their teeth in the WordPress kind of I don't like calling it like the influencer or whatever, but folks got a name for themselves because of the way in which they taught. Or leveraged or blogged about Genesis. And I really think that was really unique at the time. There weren't a lot of folks out there who were really like, there were folks like me and others who were writing about WordPress in general. But to talk specifically about implementing for a client based on a tool, that wasn't as common at that time, but it was happening for Genesis for sure. And I think you paved the way in that aspect as well, don't you think?

Brian Gardner
04:45-05:20
We built the product, yes, but the people who built sort of content driven sites around Genesis, one person in particular I'm thinking of, and I actually had the luxury of Meeting up with him in real life a few years back at WordCamp US was a guy named Shridhar. He built, and he actually blogged about this. He had a Genesis tutorial site and he was known as the de facto: hey, if anybody needs help, hire Shridhar or go check out his tutorials. He built himself and his family a house from the money he made from his endeavors. So back in its heyday, Genesis was really. A thriving town.

Matt Cromwell
05:21-05:37
Carrie Dills is another one. I met Carrie only because of her work on Genesis back in the day. And she's been doing great work ever since then and at LinkedIn Learning doing stuff there as well. It launched a whole bunch of interesting aspects for sure.

Zack Katz
05:37-05:45
And is that the same now for the market of themes? I wonder if we have another guest we could

Matt Cromwell
05:44-06:06
Introduce we do want to talk about you know this market and if you think about like who represents this market nowadays um there's probably Brian a bit And maybe one other. But he's with us today. Mike McAllister, welcome, man. Hello. Thanks for having me back.

Mike McAlister
06:07-06:11
Just been lurking in the waiting room listening to the combo.

Matt Cromwell
06:11-06:19
Yeah, absolutely. Mike, for those who might not know, let everybody know who you are and what you do, and why we asked you to be here at all.

Mike McAlister
06:20-07:12
I, like many others, learned a lot from mister Brian Gardner and the world of WordPress themes and WordPress products. And yeah, I've been around a long time too, making WordPress themes and plugins. And yeah, following kind of Brian's trajectory as well of making cool products and Staying on the forefront, building cool things, core adjacent, and now building Ollie, popular block theme And OLIPRO, and also just like out there doing fun videos and dev rally kind of stuff for WordPress. I love building on this thing, and I think we're at Standing at the base camp of a new WordPress mountain. And so we're trying to build products for that new adventure.

Matt Cromwell
07:13-07:14
I love it.

Brian Gardner
07:15-07:37
I need to clarify something here. Mike, you are by no stretch following me in any regard. You have taken that baton and have run far ahead of me. So it's. It's no secret the man crush I have in you and your design shops. And so I need to give props where it is due. The work you have done with Ali and Ali Pro. It's almost embarrassing how much I go from you guys do.

Matt Cromwell
07:37-07:39
But truth be said, Mike, you are leading the way.

Mike McAlister
07:39-07:41
Oh, thanks, brother. I appreciate that.

Matt Cromwell
07:41-08:46
That's well said. I've told Mike this before that when full site editing happened, I'm a Cadence person. I love Cadence WP. I'm embedded in that product And when Full Site Editing came out, I was like, I got to figure that out, see what that's all about, see if I even should care at all And I tried like, you know, default themes and I was like, this is a mess. I really don't enjoy this environment. And then Mike and Ollie made a bunch of waves. And I was like, ah, I guess I'll try again. And the Ollie onboarding made full site editing make sense to me. Literally, I was like, I I understand the direction now. I understand why it is what it is. And that wasn't because of WordPress Core. It wasn't because of default themes. It was because of Ollie's onboarding ironically. And I know that I've heard others say very similar things. Yeah. It needed some handholding, I think, in order for it all to make sense.

Mike McAlister
08:46-09:48
Yeah, there's and Brian knows this well too, there are many aspects of modern WordPress, full site editing as it's called. There's so much there to the modern building workflow. We got these patterns and then styles, which can include color palettes and typography pairings. and templates and settings, style settings for all that stuff. But it's all kind of like put in a Yahtzee cup and thrown over the WordPress admin. And so you kind of really have to find all these different things. and learn how to use them and figure out how they go together. It's great that we have all these things. It would be awesome if we could kind of tie them together in a more uniform way. But that's what we aimed to do with the site wizard: was like, okay, can we bring these things at least into a coherent kind of Workflow to at least get people started with their site. And it's no small task to do that. It took quite a while to figure that out. But yeah, I'm happy to see that people are enjoying it.

Matt Cromwell
09:49-12:42
So I want to set the scene just a little bit for this discussion of the block theme market, just a little bit, just so we're kind of level set together, also for the audience and whatn So, kind of the evolution of how things have gone is what we now call legacy themes. There were legacy and I'm not even going to include Genesis in that. Of course, Genesis is a legacy theme, but it was also very different. But there was legacy themes essentially that you could install from WordPress. org or download from a third party site. It was very PHP based and style sheet based And functions PHP based, generally speaking. And when you get into a theme, that theme really was like, that was your website. And so it was really important in how you're going to build out your site. For you to choose a theme that was kind of as similar to your vision as possible, especially if you don't have a lot of editing skills From there, we basically introduced page builders because of how Strict legacy themes are, we get into the world of Divi and Divi Builder and Elementor, Beaver Builder. Even WP Bakery itself, which is a whole other thing a long time ago, they evolved it too to be kind of a more robust page building experience And those actually kind of blew the doors off of WordPress adoption in many ways, especially Elementor. Anybody who's really in the industry recognizes that a lot of WordPress adoption recently over the last three or four or five years is has largely been due to tools like Elementor And then during that evolution, we get Gutenberg coming into play. And Gutenberg was always intended from the beginning to not just be only a block editor. But the whole editing experience, which after the block editor was released, I think it was about two years later, full site editing came into into being in WordPress Core. And that is what evolved to what we now have as full site editing themes, essentially. And that's kind of where we're at. And when it comes to the marketplace, all along the way, we still have a lot of legacy themes that are popular and do well. I mean, I do would count Cadence kind of in there in many ways. as a legacy theme that has a really robust block library. And then we still have a huge page builder market. And the emerging market is block themes. Are we level set? Does that sound about right? Are we all like, did I miss something? Brian, you got something, I can tell.

Brian Gardner
12:44-13:07
I always have something to say regarding WordPress and block themes. I was just kind of chuckling in my head about it being an emerging market. We want it to be an emerging market, yet it doesn't feel that way still. I don't want it to seem like here it is. It's on, you know, like, cause so many people are still so opposed to it all, which is an opportunity, but also sometimes really deflating.

Zack Katz
13:08-13:17
And I want to hear more about that. Like, how is the full site editing theme market different than the legacy theme market? Like, what are they opposed to? What's going on?

Brian Gardner
13:20-15:30
So, I mean, we talked about classic themes or legacy themes, Matt, as you called them. Then the page builder. Thing exploded, and so many people just they, you know, you find your stack and you don't want to deviate from it. Like, if it works, and to this day, Genesis still works for a lot of people. And to be honest, it'll probably work on sit Into the future for years and years to come. So, a lot of people just don't like change. They don't like some people, I think, innately just are opposed to anything WordPress does. Some people are just negative all the way around the block. And so, even though you could say WordPress now does this thing, they're like, well, my page builder does it better, which I'm like, okay, fine, you know, whatever. So there's going to be a subset of people who just. Want to use their stack, they're in an ecosystem, maybe they get some business from it, they have no reason or incentive to go outside of it. I think also most people who don't realize the current state of the block theme market. Are making judgments from two, three, four years ago that, oh, WordPress can't do this, and that's just their excuse. They won't even look into it. And they're like, well, actually, it does, and it might do it better. It's come a long way. And yes, we're still mid-flight and fixing the engine up in the air, so to speak. But I think, I mean, I'm personally just, I feel good about this. 6. 9 happening this year and the work that's being scoped out. I think Ann McCarthy published a really long post around what it's going to entail. And I am a Zealot for this new site admin or the WP admin site editor sort of consolidation of whatnot. And so, like, I see so much potential, and I have for years. It's why I actually came back to work at WP Engine, why I built Frost, why I forked that to build powder, because I see the potential of it it's just sometimes frustrating the pace in which we're getting there because you see so many things webflow, framework, Figma sites that are like Arguably steps ahead and moving much faster. Yet we're WordPress people, and that's what we build for. And so, like, it's kind of balancing that, I guess.

Matt Cromwell
15:31-15:42
I'd love to hear, like, why should anyone Care about block themes. Like you are a zealot for reasons. And I think a lot of folks don't know those reasons.

Brian Gardner
15:44-15:47
I've always been a WordPress core person, right?

Brian Gardner
15:47-15:57
So far back, and maybe 2% of the world would understand this, but even back in the Tim Thumb days, remember those Tim Thumb.

Brian Gardner
15:58-16:39
It was an image-sizing script and plug-in that people were using back in the magazine theme days And I remember to this day we had implemented that into Genesis, and then WordPress Core itself came out with its own image resizing feature. And I to this day remember where I was when I called Nathan, I said, let's undo all the work we just did. And let WordPress Core do its thing. And so I think it's powerful. I think it's not proprietary interfacing, which is confusing to users. I don't know. Mike, I'll let you take the baton here and continue gushing over the possibilities that WordPress Core can have.

Matt Cromwell
16:40-16:52
What are the advantages, Mike? Like, why should somebody care that you can do things with block themes that are different or better or than a page builder.

Mike McAlister
16:54-17:56
Yeah, I think you could even just throw out the block theme term in a way, because this block themes aren't doing much. They're style layers largely, and they tie in natively to all of the new features and the settings and the sidebar, the design settings of WordPress. This is just the WordPress editor now. If you install WordPress right now, that's the experience you get. You get the full site editing experience with the core themes, with themes like Ollie and Frost and Powder. This is the WordPress experience now. So it's almost funny because it's like we don't need to make the case that this is what you should be using, or this is like. There's some awesome sauce to it. This is just WordPress now, and so it benefits everyone. It behooves everyone to not only adopt block themes, but also to get your plugins kind of tied into this new interface because it just enhances the whole experience for everyone.

Matt Cromwell
17:56-17:58
So that's like the on the platform level.

Mike McAlister
17:58-19:20
Now, on the, you know, if you do want to talk about block themes, well, there is a huge benefit to using WordPress Core as the engine. To build your site and not having to figure out what is a page builder? Do I need one? What if I build with it for a year and I don't like it? And then what do I do next? there's a benefit to not having to hop around and find solutions and just learning the system that's always going to be there now, and it's only going to get better. So the more we kind of dial in and build for full site editing For our products and our websites, the better the experience gets. And then when they start rolling out all these awesome features like the new admin and AI is coming, clearly coming to WordPress, the core experience. you're going to get all those benefits out of the box because you're already on a full site editing experience. You're already using a block theme, and that's the interface that it's all going to be tied into. It's not going to be tied into necessarily These custom page builders, they might lose out on that because they're not really kind of adopting the core experience. Now, that's not to say there's not a use case for these plugins. There certainly is. There was a reason they became popular, and there's a reason people love them, especially for specific kinds of buildings. So I don't want to sound like an anti-page builder. I just feel like that. Kind of comes in to the equation.

Matt Cromwell
19:21-19:24
You're allowed to be anti-whatever you like, Mike. It's fine.

Zack Katz
19:25-20:02
So there's a question that came in from the audience that says if a client has already invested significantly in a website built with a classic theme, the real question becomes, are they willing to invest again to rebuild it as a block theme? So that's where I see the block theme, current state of the block theme is. We have thirty four percent of the web, forty three percent of the web, sorry, is running WordPress And that's a lot of people running old legacy themes. And like, how do we get from there to here? Or here to how do we get from here to where people have moved over to block themes? Like, what's the future?

Brian Gardner
20:04-21:27
Well, the answer to this question is probably one of the reasons why the adoption is so slow. WordPress has been historically backward compatible, sometimes to a fault, right? You know, like all the way back to 2000, whatever. And so to answer Elliot's question, no, I would have no opposition to that client staying on that classic theme for as long as they can, right? There's no need to just build it just to build it. That's a waste of money. If it works, don't bother trying to fix it. And because of that, like you know, you have to sort of, and it all depends on the client and the type of site or whatever. But you also have to understand, like, what is the lifespan of a website? You know, some people are on the same design. I designed Becoming Minimalist, like, 10 years ago, and it's still the same design. There's like this, it's not just all of a sudden people need something new because the life cycle of a website is six months. It's sometimes years, in which case. You know, a doctor's office who had a site built five years ago, they don't have a need to go into the block theme until they're ready to redesign their site, maybe add some more functionality that requires it, and then you kind of go through it then. Elliot, in this case, I would say no, don't encourage them to. I mean, if they want to, if they want to live on the wild side and want to invest into doing that, fine. But If it's working, I don't say fix it, you know?

Matt Cromwell
21:28-21:41
I have to say, for me, one of the appeals to full site editing and block themes in general, from what I've noticed anecdotally, is they just seem to be really fast.

Brian Gardner
21:42-21:44
They seem to be really fast.

Matt Cromwell
21:45-22:37
Like I do a lot of local development for a lot of different purposes. I have started using I've used local WP for forever, talking to folks who are tangential to local WP. But I've been using WordPress Studio recently because it's interesting and fun And you spin up a site in there and it loads up twenty twenty five and the thing loads in milliseconds. And I switched to pages milliseconds. And I I build something out and I refresh the page milliseconds. It's the fastest local experience I've ever experienced. And it has to be related to the theme, how minimal the theme is. Can you guys speak to that a little bit? Like is that one reason why people should care about block themes? Is just pure performance?

Mike McAlister
22:37-23:14
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it has automat that's kind of one of the things I was talking about, kind of tying into the core experience, you get all those benefits. The performance team spent tons of time Making sure that that is what happens with a block theme. Because you get automatic tree shaking built in. That's where, like, it only the page only loads the block styles that are absolutely critical, it only loads the fonts that you're actually using on the page. All that comes cooked into WordPress now, and all that comes through with a block theme and theme JSON, that that that stuff is wired through the theme, the JSON file.

Matt Cromwell
23:16-23:20
Brian, you had a little bit of a mixed messages look.

Brian Gardner
23:21-23:31
Oh, my head's all over the place. I'm still thinking about something I said five minutes ago, which is like where the weird look comes from. But the agreement of what Mike said is 100% there.

Zack Katz
23:31-24:11
So I've always been fascinated by the theme business. As a plug-in guy myself, like Themes have always seemed like a bad idea, to be honest. Because plugins for me are functionality and themes are visual and style, and that changes more than the need for functionality. So I've always thought like, you know, Plugins are a better bet than themes. That has seemed to be continuing. That seems to be have been true for like a decade, and yet themes are still a vi a business that is seemingly viable. Am I wrong? Like, how is the themes business doing?

Mike McAlister
24:13-24:15
Well, somebody's got to make them.

Brian Gardner
24:15-24:17
I mean, that's the thing.

Mike McAlister
24:17-25:10
It's like the themes, you're absolutely right. They have been historically kind of sidelined and backburnered. kind of treated as almost second-class citizens, which perplexes me as somebody who has made them for a long time. But not only that, but because like philosophically Your site and like functionality, all that's great. But the visual part of your site is what everyone sees right away. And some people make a decision right away whether or not they trust your site based on how it looks. And so to design really is high stakes in a lot of ways. And so it doesn't seem like a commodity to me. It seems like a critical part of your site. And so With the way we build Ollie and historically, I've done design is bringing super high caliber design to WordPress through themes.

Brian Gardner
25:10-25:11
There's no other way of doing it.

Mike McAlister
25:12-25:25
So For me, it makes sense that it has to be done by somebody. And if nobody else wants to really dip into the block theme market, I guess Brian and I will just be the guys to make it. So, yeah.

Matt Cromwell
25:25-25:29
Brian, what are you seeing in terms of adoption of your themes?

Brian Gardner
25:32-26:45
You know, like WordPress is such a and I think we fight the battle of WordPress being open source and everything should be Freeze and beer. Like, there's so many people. And the problem is, there are so many good themes. Ali, for instance, is on the wordpress. org repository as a free theme without even Ali Pro. It's beautiful, right? So, like. And I tweeted about this a couple nights ago, and I won't go too deep into this, but I'm kind of this week. I'm going through a phase where I'm like, man, the race to the bottom in WordPress themes right now seems so fast, so much more than it ever was. Because there's so many free themes. There's so many people doing eh work. You know, and then you're up against Webflow, Framer, Squarespace, Shopify, these industries and these markets that are so much more better designed. I remember like years ago, I went to Squarespace, like after they did one of the redesigns. And I was like, oh my God, like as a designer, somebody who's very pretentious when it comes to the way things look. I'm like, can you imagine if WordPress looked like this from like the website, the marketing website of WordPress? I'm like, it would be, you know, and WordPress, for whatever reason, has historically always been just so bad.

Brian Gardner
26:45-26:53
I say badly designed, I don't mean to really cut it down, but there's an opportunity for growth, I guess, from a design perspective.

Brian Gardner
26:53-27:31
And, you know, to recognize the work that the team has done there recently to rebrand it and to like. Make it more modern. I certainly applaud all of those efforts as well. But man, I'm like, I sometimes wish I just like, I just wish Things were better designed. And I think that's why Mike and I are doing what we're doing because, like, I think we have the ability to, I think we have some reach. But it only goes so far because it powers 43% of the internet. So so many people aren't even in the conversation about it. They just go to a thing and hire somebody and they do the work. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of men.

Mike McAlister
27:31-27:46
Have you ever seen a WordPress marketing video? Ever. I'm serious. Like have you ever seen a WordPress a marketing video? It looks like something that Webflow or Framer or any SaaS has created.

Zack Katz
27:46-27:52
Have you ever seen that on the WordPress. org webpage? Yeah, yeah, I bet it wasn't very good.

Mike McAlister
27:52-28:18
No offense to whoever made it. But that it is a huge disconnect that we have in terms of like We're sitting here talking about this awesome thing that we have now, the site editor and block editor and all these cool things, but we're not telling the story virtually anywhere. And maybe it's because historically we've been able to rely on the automatic growth that we've had, just kind of growing and growing and growing. But now with everything popping up, where design is like World-class design is table stakes almost.

Brian Gardner
28:19-28:21
Every new SaaS that pops up looks incredible.

Mike McAlister
28:22-28:45
And if we don't kind of get on that and figure out how to start telling this story. It's not just about growth. It's about optics. And are we an old platform, or are we one that's leaning into the future? And it seems like we're leaning into the future. We have AI and all this stuff. But again, we're not really telling that story very well right now. So it would help to start there too.

Matt Cromwell
28:45-28:54
Yeah, for sure. Folks listening in, if you want to find a really great WordPress video, look up the WordPress wiggle It's a great WordPress focused video.

Zack Katz
28:55-29:00
The best marketing for WordPress ever. Yeah, I'll declare it right here.

Matt Cromwell
29:00-29:01
Wiggle.

Zack Katz
29:01-29:04
fun. If you go to wiggle. fun, that is the domain name

Matt Cromwell
29:04-29:12
That's the domain name. Oh my gosh. Giving it away. Zack created this video for the WordPress community, and it's amazing. It's wonderful.

Brian Gardner
29:15-29:40
I'm going to jump in really quickly. I see a question from Kevin, and it reminds me of something I watched probably two years ago. It was so I'll read it. Well, we can we see it on screen. And this is inside of my head, I think the biggest problem I've had over the last several years, which is How to separate design and functionality and what belongs in a theme, what belongs in a design for the audio listeners.

Matt Cromwell
29:40-29:53
Kevin Geary is in the comments and he says, I spelled out the critical problem with themes. They combine design and functionality. You're choosing architecture while choosing design, and that's a gigantic problem. That's Kevin's comment.

Zack Katz
29:53-30:01
He continues, when you have a flexible unified architecture, people will buy design slash layout packages because they know they won't be locked into functionality limitations.

Brian Gardner
30:03-31:06
And so, this opens a really big conversation around open source and walled gardens. Because a couple of years ago, Chris Pearson did a video about the demise of WordPress e-commerce, and he talked about the fact that WooCommerce is a plug-in. You need all of these different add-ons and they cost lots of money. And he was sort of making the point where, like, Shopify, which has sort of like a unified experience in the sense of like a A code base that people just design on top of. It's walled and it's a garden. And yes, so I want to make sure I say that. The problem with WordPress, but the opportunity with WordPress is that there's no sort of centralization of things. You've got page builders doing their thing. We've got block themes kind of calling things. And this talks about like the font colors and the sizes and things that is there a way to sort of harmonize stuff so we're all building on the same system. The problem is no. And I think to Kevin's point, some of these themes, Genesis was one of them, you know, introduce functionality. They register custom post types inside of a theme, which is really bad if

Brian Gardner
31:06-31:08
Then you deactivate that theme and go somewhere else.

Brian Gardner
31:09-31:43
And so, like, is do I wish? I'll say this before, and I've said this many times. Do I wish that during the Gutenberg announcement and the WordPress 5. 0 thing, WordPress would have forked itself and called itself something like WordPress Pro, which was like a new Platform that people just sort of plugged into. I wish it would have. I understand why it didn't. And I still think there's a lot of benefit to the fact that it never did. But I think to his point, like, and you know, where do you draw the line? Because it's sort of the Wild West, and you can do both things inside of a theme.

Matt Cromwell
31:44-32:28
I would say, like, I get Kevin's perspective, specifically because of Kevin's experience and the work that he's doing. Which is, I would just I didn't list Kevin's etch product when I was talking about the whole history of things because it's its own thing. It's its own thing. It's very different. A different approach because he's trying to solve that problem that he's highlighting here. But I think that, that perspective comes from the dev builder perspective. the one that cares about separation of concerns in a way that is sustainable for the project. But we know that WordPress is also largely a user-oriented platform.

Brian Gardner
32:28-32:33
And the user doesn't give a damn about that point at all.

Matt Cromwell
32:33-32:54
They don't care at all. Maybe they should. Maybe we can educate them. Those are all aspects of this conversation for sure. But in general, they're going to be choosing a theme or a pattern or a library based on whether or not it's going to make their business look the way they want it to look.

Brian Gardner
32:56-33:26
Until they change themes, right? That's the problem. And like if I create a website and I Use a bunch of powder patterns and set up a beautiful website. And then I happen to see a product marketing video by Mr. McAllister that talks all about Ollie. And I switched to Ollie, every single page I've built in Powder now is broken because Powder has chosen a different sort of architecture and naming structure than Ollie has. And so, from that point of view,

Brian Gardner
33:27-33:28
It's a bad experience.

Brian Gardner
33:28-33:40
Yes, people will work. And Mike, I know you were going to say something a minute or two ago, and I'd love to hear your perspective on where we were talking. But, like. I understand that's a problem, and I don't know how to fix it. I don't think there is a way to fix it.

Matt Cromwell
33:40-33:42
Is it a theme portability problem?

Brian Gardner
33:43-33:44
Yeah, yes.

Mike McAlister
33:44-34:51
Yeah, go ahead, Zack. Did you have something you wanted to say? It's kind of a little bit of a change of topic, so please go ahead. Okay. Yeah. I you know, I do historically understand this, and I think it was a lot more important. A long time ago, I guess. These days, I just don't like it. I kind of math's side where it's like, I don't see it as much of a problem. These are websites. I think we kind of need to get over these esoteric debates about what is philosophically a website and look at what's happening and how fast the web is moving outside of WordPress. People do not care about these kinds of things. They want websites. If you go to any other platform, it's just as like temporary of a website that it is switching between block themes. If we really want, we can solve that problem in WordPress. In fact, I have a prototype that helps you switch between block themes. It's not that hard to do. You just change in a few variables, basically. But again, I think this kind of utopian idea of switching themes and it's perfectly seamless that never existed.

Brian Gardner
34:51-34:55
It will never exist. And I don't think people actually care.

Mike McAlister
34:55-35:01
that much about it. It seems like a developer conversation people like to have, but not a real actual problem.

Matt Cromwell
35:02-35:06
I think people understand that when you update your site, it's going to take a little work.

Mike McAlister
35:07-35:08
That's just the way it is.

Matt Cromwell
35:08-35:44
I felt like that was a little bit in view when Gutenberg was being built out, though, in the first place. If you get rid of a plugin that registered a bunch of blocks, all that's left behind is more or less a placeholder, a code placeholder, like HTML comments that Could be just completely disappeared on the front end, worst case, or maybe it converts well in one way or another. It feels like that Idea was kind of baked into Gutenberg a little bit and maybe could be expanded on. I don't know.

Zack Katz
35:45-37:36
I do think it speaks to a larger issue, which is the developer experience. Like, okay, so you have a site that has a bunch of blocks that disappear when you switch themes or don't look good anymore. Is there a standard screen where I can review all the blocks that need to be adjusted? No, there's not. Is there like any sort of migration pathway? Not currently. And I think that was a mistake to not have ready for the initial Gutenberg release. But I've had recent experience with block theme issues, and I agree with Elliott 100%. The main issue I've always had with block theming is version control. You could argue the database becomes the source of truth now, but as a developer, I'd much prefer a Git based approach. So I've been trying to redesign my website, and it's been horrible, in part because there's no way to Actually, make changes using code. I thought that the theme. json file was the answer to this, and that I'd be update theme. json, push it, and everything would magically work Like a JSON version of a CSS file. That's not the case. And I felt very misled as to the benefits of the block theming structure. And then I asked, how do you do this? How do you actually How do you get versions of your site? Like, how do you see what's changing? And I was told you have to download zips. You have to go create block theme, download a zip, and then back that up. It's madness as a developer. For me to look at a block theme and say, like, this is the obvious way forward. Well, maybe if you're starting from scratch, it's a horrible it has been for me a horrible experience that I don't recommend to anybody unless you're just starting fresh. And saying, like, I'm not even going to try to port my existing theme, or like, I'm going to build a new website, import my content, put on a theme, and like start from there. Migration was not good for me.

Brian Gardner
37:37-37:41
Everything is fun in games until somebody clicks the reset styles button.

Zack Katz
37:42-37:48
I lost a week of develop of multiple people working on this website just because we didn't know how it worked.

Brian Gardner
37:48-37:51
I do think Okay, so real quick though, go ahead, Mike.

Mike McAlister
37:52-38:19
Just to finish that point, Zack's exactly right. Like the conversation we should be having is not about necessarily the fine-tuned portability from theme to theme. It is on the developer level. That is a huge missing piece. Even just being able to make a pattern and write it to your theme, there's no core way of doing that. It's a very goofy process. So that is where, if we want to like Hammer on things, that I think is a very important place to place some attention.

Brian Gardner
38:20-38:34
Yeah, and this brings us back to, I think Maybe a central reason why things are the way they are in the block theme space is that I think the, well, just say the general consensus is that Gutenberg came out to compete with Squarespace and Wix.

Brian Gardner
38:34-38:36
I mean, that was the answer like five years ago.

Brian Gardner
38:37-39:29
And that means was WordPress itself actually going more towards the DIY user versus the developer? And if that's the case, That's symptomatic. Users and DIY people don't care. They don't care about version control. They just want to change some things and it gets stored off in the database, and that's fine. Assuming they don't push the reset styles button, that's enough for them. They have a theme, it's a good place to start. They do their customizations, end a story. Now I think what we're seeing here is sort of the tension between what WordPress where it seemed to have gone from a mark like who the market was Who it was built for versus like the developer side. And we're like, hey, wait a second. Like, we're the ones who brought WordPress here. We're the ones who have the $20,000 websites. Then, Zack, very much to your point, and so much to your point, that I don't generally use the database to store my things. I just go back into my theme JSON file and make all of my updates in the theme itself.

Brian Gardner
39:29-39:31
So it's always the source of truth that's right.

Zack Katz
39:31-39:40
But there's no, there's no, I wish there were disable overrides, like so that only theme JSON were able to be used.

Brian Gardner
39:42-40:01
Well, that would effectively take out all of the controls because the controls are there as an extension of to change a color. And we won't even talk about global controls versus like individual controls, like changing the size or color of a Specific heading because then that becomes even more problematic because you reset your styles and that's baked into like mark notes.

Matt Cromwell
40:01-40:11
I mean, so honestly, in so many ways, what you're all bringing up is that The state of the block theme market is broken.

Brian Gardner
40:13-40:19
I wouldn't that might be yeah, I would say that the I would more succinctly, I would say that the

Mike McAlister
40:18-40:45
the developer experience for modern WordPress is insufficient. I think if you get through that and you can build like, you know, Ollie's a fully functioning, successful product in the block space. And it's because we spent the time to figure it out and built the tools we needed. To fill the gaps to do that. So you can build through it and get a product up and out, but I think and To somebody's point earlier, WordPress isn't just a bunch of developers.

Brian Gardner
40:45-40:49
It's largely end users, and they're the ones that are going to benefit from these products.

Mike McAlister
40:49-41:01
Now, for the builders, though, that is where there's a disconnect. Could be a product potential for somebody to kind of get in there and build something. It would be great if it happened in core, but you know. Yeah.

Matt Cromwell
41:01-41:34
Yeah. I mean, I have tried myself, experimenting a lot with building out a new online documentation plugin. And I built it a classic theme first oriented. And then I was like, you know what? I should just take a stab at trying to make this work with a full site editing theme. and I started to register some patterns to work on my custom post type, and it became extremely excruciating to figure out how to make that work from a plug in perspective.

Zack Katz
41:35-41:53
So it sounds like we have consensus that the developer experience needs to be improved. But my question is, what about for people who are looking into getting into the theme space? And for product owners who are already in the theme space, what advice do you two have for them?

Brian Gardner
41:55-41:57
For people learn how to build plugins.

Mike McAlister
41:59-43:19
I would say figure out understand the full site editing paradigm. Because I think people still don't quite understand the paradigm, like how these things fit together and what it means for what a block theme is. It's not like the old style themes. You really have to change your thinking about it and get off this idea that it's It's much lighter. The best thing you can do for a block theme is make sure it integrates perfectly with the controls and everything that are already there, and that it's fully customizable, and you're not adding CSS that can't be overwritten by the user. There's a lot to take in in that paradigm, and it takes building a few sites to understand how it works. Then you can understand what makes good product in that space, but you have to understand the problem first. And I also just think, and I've said this many times on different pods, is that we're not this era is going to dictate that there are not going to be or we're not going to need as many Themes anymore. We just don't need them. They Ollie and Frost, they all do kind of different versions of the same thing. And that all the all the power and all the energy is in WordPress Core and the style layer on the theme is like Dictates that maybe we only need one core default theme going forward, and we just slightly tweak it because you just don't need that many themes for this new era.

Matt Cromwell
43:20-43:34
Correct me if I'm wrong there, though, that but the patterns, the theme especially Ollie, you're registering a lot of patterns. And if the theme is swapped out, those patterns are then gone.

Mike McAlister
43:34-43:34
Yeah.

Matt Cromwell
43:35-43:45
Yep. Yeah. And that's where patterns themselves might be what the people really want. So like themes stop being themes and start being libraries of patterns.

Mike McAlister
43:45-44:23
Yeah. And that's where it'd be great if we had shared Slugs and variables that you could really mix and match, but we kind of dropped the ball on that too. So everyone kind of uses their own Slugs and it becomes, you know, so yeah, I think it's even though it's we're several years in now, I think it's still shaking out to what this is going to look like. But I think there's a reason that there's not so many block themes. I just don't know exactly why. I think one reason as well is like you do have to have some design sense because it is a design layer. And so You need to know how to make it, and you need to know how to kind of design it so it fits all together in this theme sandwich of sorts.

Matt Cromwell
44:25-44:31
Brian, what's your best advice for folks who are trying to cut their teeth in the block theme market?

Brian Gardner
44:34-45:33
I don't know that I would tell anybody at this point to just go try to create a WordPress theme business. First and foremost, it's a tough market, anyways, and without having any sort of historical Credibility or name, it's hard to make a name for yourself now, right? And even then, like, what does that actually mean? We haven't even talked about AI or what even a website is, or the fact I mean. The need for a website has significantly decreased over the last 12 hours, much less two weeks or five months or whatever. And so, like, there's parts of me where I'm like And I say this as a former partner of Copy Blogger, where we preached about digital sharecropping. It seems to be more the accepted behavior now, and people don't care. Like, I think Mikey said this, but people don't care. I remember I was doing a real estate project a few years ago, and I said to somebody, somebody's like, I don't need a website.

Brian Gardner
45:33-45:34
I have LinkedIn or I have Facebook.

Brian Gardner
45:35-47:22
And I'm like, it's true that in certain markets, you don't even need a website. So, like, I think there's so much of WordPress and theme and design stuff that in my head, I'm like, I know I can do a whole bunch of things with it, but is there even a need for the things I want to create And I think that's the bigger problem, which is there's probably a lot more, and Zack, to your point, as we started, so much more opportunity in finding the actual needs within WordPress Than trying to like be yet another theme shop or try to make, I mean, when's the last time you heard a theme shop get acquired for $10 million? And it doesn't really happen. I don't know if it ever did But the plugin business, the functionality part of it all, I think is and I hate to say this because I'm not a developer. I'm good, but not great at writing code. So, like, again, I'm not trying to dissuade anybody from joining the market per se. As a table stakes thing, as part of your value add, I mean, I would say, sure, yeah, create a free theme and build functionality on top of it and do other things. like Mike is doing with Ollie, or even like what Kevin's doing with Etch. I talked to him yesterday, and I plan on just understanding what he's building and why, because I live in my own siloed lane in my head. It's got to be this way. This is the only way I ever do things. And I think we learn a lot about a lot of things when you just go under the hood and just try to understand other perspectives. You know, what are the opportunities out there and stuff like that? And, you know, I've got Ali Pro. I took it down. I ripped open the code. I'm like, what is he doing? And how does this work? Because I want to know, not so I can steal it, though I could potentially with the licensing, but like. You know, like, because maybe it like it opens the door in my mind to like, hey, maybe there's a different opportunity or a different place I can go with my business or the things that I'm working on That are not just like what the next person's doing.

Zack Katz
47:22-47:39
Well, as somebody who's built their business on top of Gravity Forms, hello. I wonder. For people who are looking to enter the theme business, would it make sense to have, like, I don't know, Genesis had tons of people doing this where they would sell child themes. Is that still a path toward prosperity?

Matt Cromwell
47:41-47:42
That's a good point.

Zack Katz
47:42-47:44
I mean, probably not child themes, right?

Matt Cromwell
47:44-47:50
But more like, you know, Ollie-based patterns. Yeah, ecosystem kind of thing.

Zack Katz
47:52-47:58
Yeah. Thriving due to their ecosystem. Is Ollie ecosystem something you're trying to build out, Mike?

Mike McAlister
47:59-48:48
I would say like It's a cool idea. I don't know because of how new everything still is. And I also think still, The WordPress product ecosystem is just moving at a snail's pace. Not even themes. I'm talking about plugins though. There's so many plugins. that are just so big and they have so many installs, there's no incentive for them to really update for the block editor era. It's still difficult for people to build block plugins and things. I think it is it's people should start leaning on AI coding agents as assistants because they can write really good plugins that are good, well written code. And so yeah, I mean, an ecosystem thing could shake out if the kind of the plug-in ecosystem kind of wakes up a little bit, I think.

Matt Cromwell
48:49-49:08
Interesting. I in terms of where we kind of like very stealthily moved into best advice section of our Of our show. And I think I'm going to piggyback on Brian a little bit because I'm going to disagree with Brian Gardner.

Zack Katz
49:08-49:11
Let's go. When it comes to, are you sure you want to do that, Matt? Yeah.

Matt Cromwell
49:11-49:13
Yeah, that's on the record.

Brian Gardner
49:15-49:22
I might suggest you do that, but disagree with me, because that's probably a smarter path to go. I mean, what's your thing in this show?

Matt Cromwell
49:22-51:10
And when I talk To folks at WordCamps and everything, when they're asking about like, I'm trying to get into the product business in one way or another, like, what do I do? We talk about like market opportunities and like, where do you find you know, everything seems so flooded and so like there's you know, there's so much uh crowded uh space when it comes to like Can't build a form plug-in. That's like totally filled. You can't build a donation plug-in. That one's filled. But honestly, if you think about it right now, You know, there really is like you two that are building block themes right now. And that just to me, like, that means that there's a lot of opportunity right now. Now, is it lucrative opportunity? I'm not totally sure. But it's lots of opportunity for innovation, for sure. There's lots of opportunity for something in one way or another because if you're looking for a place to dig in and you know how to scratch this itch in particular It's a wide open field. It's wide open right now. Now, what that exactly looks like might be etch, you know. I think Kevin looked at the field and was like, hey, there's a wide open area here, and I'm going to do something so radically different designed towards my audience. And he jumped on that. So I do think that Etch is. one of the examples of trying to innovate in this space, considering where we are today right now. But I haven't seen anybody say Look, I'm going to build the most beautiful design-oriented pattern library that WordPress has ever seen. I haven't seen anybody really do that. And say, like, oh, and by the way, it works great with Ollie. By the way, it works great with Frost.

Brian Gardner
51:10-51:13
By the way, it works great even if you're using Cadence.

Matt Cromwell
51:14-51:22
It works under all these different circumstances That might be something that is a wide open field right now.

Zack Katz
51:22-52:24
I think it makes sense for the translation layer to be done in each Theme at this point to try to be back compatible with other themes. And that's its own kind of nightmare of maintenance. But we have a listener Sinan WP says, I have some plans for my block theme still shaping up, but I think the patterns are going to be my main plan. Yeah. Sounds really good. You know, this as a plug-in guy, one of the things that WordPress added on the repository, on the plug-in directory, you can have. Like JavaScript-only plugins that are listed when you do a search for blocks, that's still so underutiliz I've found the weirdest plugins when searching for a block that it seems like people could optimize for that really well. Heck, I'll have that as best advice. Just try to get listed as a suggestion in your block in the block theme pattern search, or not even pattern search, but like block searching functionality.

Brian Gardner
52:26-53:11
Let me can I walk back by saying I disagree harder than I thought. Oh my gosh. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, I want to clarify. I don't think I would not encourage anybody to go in and build a blocked A block theme, a utilitarian block theme to serve all the people, because that's Jack of all trades, master of none. WordPress has always, and plugins are a great exam WordPress has always been the ripest place to verticalize and go into niche marketing. So many people don't do it. I remember back in the Genesis days. Shea Box created a theme called Foodie. It was one theme. It served a very specific market. It was underserved. And in her heyday, I hate to say this out loud, but she was making over $10,000 a month on that one theme alone.

Brian Gardner
53:11-53:13
Because food blocking was a thing.

Brian Gardner
53:14-54:11
And she didn't even go into the functionality pieces of it. And Similarly, I think that was my problem with powder. I was like, I'm just going to create a theme and it's going to, I'm going to serve all the people. One day I'm going to serve wedding photographers and then I'm going to serve lawyers. And it's like, You can't go very deep in all of that stuff. And so I think, I mean, Mike, you're Ollie's like for creators, right? If you take a kind of look at the The like sort of the design packs you have inside of them. I mean, it's all around kind of a specific sort of sort of subset. I got so frustrated with the current state of block theme market right now that I'm going into a vertical. I'm like, you know, I'm going to solve a bigger problem with people who have an actual need and get out of my own sort of I sometimes get into this mindset where I'm just going to create art and people are going to buy it.

Brian Gardner
54:11-54:18
I'm like, that is not working. So I'm going to put on the business cap and solve a problem for a subset of people who really.

Brian Gardner
54:19-54:24
Have a need, and that's where I'm going to actually pivot and take my interest projects.

Mike McAlister
54:24-55:14
So I think that's super smart. There's no You know, there's no solutions out there for these verticals, for this modern block theme era. There's all these old junky themes that have just been around forever. Sorry to say, but they they are, they're junk. There's you could create that solution for lawyers. Make a nice block theme that kind of low stakes, it's got all the right styles, kind of geared a little more professional. A few utility plug-ins which you can whip up easily with AI to kind of get that very specific functionality, reach out. For a quote and all these things, you know, and you could set that up on instaWP where people instantly launch your site. Like, all that's out there and possible if you Want to do it. And I think verticals are a very smart place to target.

Matt Cromwell
55:15-55:17
Nice. So

Zack Katz
55:17-55:21
I'll sign up for this best advice too. I'm on board.

Matt Cromwell
55:21-55:33
Hey, I think we just created a business together. Is that just what happened live on the show? We're all jumping into verticalized block Vertical WP. Let's go.

Zack Katz
55:34-55:35
Verticals, people.

Matt Cromwell
55:37-55:46
Awesome. Any last thoughts, ideas, comments, questions, hopes and dreams and aspirations for the world of block themes?

Brian Gardner
55:49-57:01
I'll start us here because I saw a tweet last night. I can't remember who tweeted it. Actually, it's post. They're post now, right? Because it's X Something around, and I think we can all agree, WordPress, the core WordPress community is a very, very deep echo chamber. We talk to the same hundred people and we all talk about to each other and whatever, right? And WordCamp US is coming up, and that's going to happen again. Again, sort of reiterate what I was talking about. I think to your question, Matt, about like what would you tell someone who wants to get into the WordPress theme space? Like, the best way for me to Sort of give the last piece of advice I'll give, which is instead of saying I'm going to create a WordPress thing that does X, how about I'm going to solve a problem that just happens to be WordPress-based Right. Like the industry I'm going to serve, I'm not going to create a WordPress theme for these people. I'm going to go serve these people and happen to do it by building them a WordPress them And so I think, and I've been challenging myself to sort of look outside of WordPress, like not outside of WordPress, like I'm going to go build for other places, but just be like, okay, like Bring WordPress down a little bit and solve real world problems with WordPress versus like, I'm going to do a thing that does X. I don't know. I'm not articulating my thoughts.

Matt Cromwell
57:02-57:31
No, I've heard several folks say at times, like, we should stop making WordPress an adjective. Of everything we do. We're not building like a WordPress donation plugin. We're not building a WordPress calendar. We're not building a WordPress theme. We're solving these problems for customers that happen to be on WordPress. I think that's really good advice for sure. Yep.

Zack Katz
57:32-57:40
Well, I think that's a wrap. Brian, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Mike McAlister
57:42-57:50
Yeah, you could find me on x. com slash Mike McAllister, or you can find Ollie at olliewp. com.

Brian Gardner
57:53-58:10
Similarly, I'm bee gardener in most places, especially on X and like Instagram. BrianGardner. com is really still the hub of what I'm going to build. And you can find me in my future project at insert domain name that nobody knows. Oh, come on.

Zack Katz
58:10-58:14
You don't want to launch it here? Launch it live.

Brian Gardner
58:14-58:16
No, I well, it's password protected.

Zack Katz
58:17-58:20
I could say the name, but where should they go to get on the waiting list?

Brian Gardner
58:22-58:35
Just follow me on Twitter, X, whatever it's called. That's where I always sort of telegraph all my moves. And if you start seeing polls around certain things, then you really know I'm in the weeds on building something for that when I start. Because that's sort of my way to get market research.

Zack Katz
58:36-58:55
So thank you both so much for joining us. And next week, continuing the theme of themes, our hosts Kitty and Amber will be chatting with Yonat Negu, founder of Themile. So he'll be talking with us about how to set your pricing according to the stage your product and business is in. This is good stuff. So put it in your calendar now.

Matt Cromwell
58:55-59:13
Yep, and special thanks to Post Status for being our green room every single week. If you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor: hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. We're on all the podcast channels, so you can follow us there. Share it with your friends, reference it in your email newsletters, all the things if you could.

Matt Cromwell
59:13-59:18
That'd be nice. And don't forget to tune in again next week. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one.